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Polly Perks
Polly Perks is the central character in the novel Monstrous Regiment. ''She is the daughter of the owner of a famous inn known as the Duchess in the town of Muntz in Borogravia. '' ''She works there as a barmaid and is the one who should be inheriting the inn when her parents pass away instead of her brother because she is much more capable, can read and write and really runs the show. Her brother, Paul had enlisted in the Borogravian Army and has gone missing in action so Polly decides to join the army to find him. Nugganatic law does not allowed her to inherit the family business when her father dies and if her brother does not turn up the inn will go to Cousin Volopo who is a notorious drunkard who will lose it. She chooses a pseudonym of Oliver, after the main character in the folk song Sweet Polly Oliver, which is about a girl running off to join the army. Polly cuts off her hair, practices picking her nose, farting, swearing and walking like a man so that she will fit in. She then enlists in the Borogravian Tenth Foot regiment, known colloquially as the Ins-and-Outs (British slang for sex) or the Cheesemongers, as a Private but soon rises in the ranks to become a Sergeant. Private 'Ozzer' Perks serves with the colourful Sgt Jackrum, a reformed vampire named Maladict, a troll called Carborundum, an Igor, and a few even stranger people, who are, in fact, just humans. Over the course of the novel, she finds that all of the other recruits who joined up with her are in fact women pretending with varying degrees of success to be men. She has a number of experiences where her gender is almost revealed, notably when she forgets to scream after Lieutenant Blouse's horse bites her in the socks that she has stuffed down her pants to give her anatomy the necessary configuration. Lieutenant Blouse, like most men witnessing such a deed would probably do, faints. Under the instruction of the legendary Sergeant Jackrum, she discovers an aptitude for the soldiering life she never suspected she had, leading the regiment on a clandestine assault on the castle stronghold and negotiating a peace treaty. Even after she is found out to be a woman, she fights to stay on as a soldier. She is allowed to do so primarily owing to the intervention of the dead Grand Duchess Annagovia and a certain amount of blackmail on the part of Sergeant Jackrum. Through the medium of a ''Ankh-Morpork Times political cartoon, drawn by Fizz, Polly gains notoriety on the international stage as the young soldier who kneed Prince Heinrich of Zlobenia in the groin. On her advice, Jackrum goes into retirement with his family after the end of the present conflict. When Heinrich seems likely to invade again, however, Jackrum sends her his cutlasses and, far more significantly, his book of names of officers he knows to be women. With the metaphorical torch passed, and in possession of a great deal of potential blackmail material, she comes out of her relative inactivity back at the family inn (with her brother home safe and sound) for a future career of an unknown but presumably interesting nature. Appearances * Monstrous Regiment Category:Characters Category:Females